The Sami people are lobbying the Swedish government for a truth and reconciliation process to address human rights violations against them — historical and ongoing — against the background of a debate about how the country should behave toward its newest arrivals.

Representatives of the indigenous group point to forced sterilization, preservation of Sami human remains at government research facilities and the so-called “cultural genocide” that all but eliminated them from the official history of their country.

“There was historical violence, murder and discrimination against the Sami that was so painful people have been generationally unwilling to speak out, partly through fear,” said India Reed-Bowers, a legal adviser to the Sami parliament, which monitors issues of Sami culture in Sweden. “This is why a truth and reconciliation process is necessary.”

Last year the UN’s special rapporteur on indigenous rights, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, renewed the call for a Sami truth commission, first made by a Sami youth group in 2008.

“The Sami parliament, which has around 9,000 Sami voters, is working with the Swedish discrimination ombudsman in order to try and arrange this,” said Reed-Bowers, one of the authors of the report.

Reed-Bowers, who is American, linked Swedish society’s lack of understanding of its indigenous Sami minority to the rise of the Sweden Democrats, the far-right party that has been winning an increasing number of votes in general elections since 2002.

"Swedes seem to know more about Native Americans than they do about their own indigenous population” — Author of report on Sami integration

Sweden is known for having one of the highest rates of refugee intake per capita in Europe, and has struggled with assimilation since deepening crises in Syria and Iraq drove the number of refugees seeking asylum to unprecedented levels.

As a result the debate over race and assimilation has risen to the top of the political agenda in Sweden, a country that is liberal without — it is sometimes suggested — being fully multicultural.

“There is a lot of repressed anxiety about race in Sweden,” Reed-Bowers said. “The conversation here is whether there should even be a multicultural society: partly because the Sami have been invisible for so long. Swedes seem to know more about Native Americans than they do about their own indigenous population.”

One of the Sami’s main grievances relates to the human remains kept in several government-run institutions, including Uppsala University, the Swedish history museum and the Karolinska Institute.

“The Sami parliament has been asking for these to be returned since 2007, so the remains can be reburied,” said May-Britt Ohman, a writer and academic, who explained that the remains are a remnant of Sweden’s era of the now widely discredited science of “racial biology.”

The Swedish church is conducting its own inquiries into human rights abuses of the Sami people, and plans to publish reports on Sami history and the legacy of segregated Sami boarding schools, which existed until 1962.

According to Kaisa Syrjanen Schaal, head of the church’s indigenous and minority rights unit, studies of the Sami as an “inferior race” coincided with land grabs of historical Sami areas.

“The Sami were dehumanized and at the same time there was a strong push for large-scale industry, which needed minerals found in the north, on Sami land,” she said

A man sits in front of a Sami flag (Getty)

In her U.N. address last year, Josefina Lundgren Skerk, vice president of the Sami parliament in Sweden, raised the issue of the forced sterilization of Sami women. The subject has long been taboo, and had not been publicly addressed before, despite a recent investigation into the practice involving Roma women in Sweden, some of whom allegedly received financial compensation for the procedure.

Skerk drew a link between policies of forced sterilization and the “cultural genocide” that erased Sami tradition from mainstream Swedish culture.

“The Swedish state may not have killed all of us, but they have undoubtedly done a lot to eradicate the Sami people in more subtle ways, like banning language, culture and dividing us into rival groups, as well as enforcing their view of who and what is Sami instead of using ours.”

Historically the Swedish state recognized the legal rights of Sami reindeer herders, but made it difficult for other Sami to be recognized as part of the minority group.

There is no definitive record of how many Sami currently live in Sweden, and the 9,000 registered by the Sami parliament may be only the tip of the iceberg. Collecting data based on ethnicity is banned in Sweden, another by-product of the national shame engendered by its eugenics period.

“People to this day are ashamed to discuss their Sami heritage,” said Reed-Bowers. “So I really start to wonder how many Swedes are part Sami. It’s been a very successful colonization.”

For the Sami, acknowledging their cultural identity gives rise to another question: Am I Sami enough?

Sweden’s Lutheran church, which was disestablished in 2000, had played the role of record keeper and often gave Swedish-sounding names to the Sami population, assimilating them bureaucratically.

“In academia I know people who will not say they are Sami because it would not be beneficial to their careers, people who hide their identity,” May-Britt Ohman said, who is of Sami descent, said. “I began reclaiming mine a few years back. But if you do this in Sweden, people want to know: ‘Why are you insisting on this?’ Both the fear of the other and the shame of being the other are there.”

For the Sami, acknowledging their cultural identity gives rise to another question: Am I Sami enough? To the Swedish state, Sami ethnicity is mainlyl synonymous with reindeer herding. But what about the Sami who didn’t choosethat role?

“It’s very complex,” said Ohman. “And these are dangerous times: There are racists again in the Swedish parliament and the Sami have always been subject to fierce aggression. What we need to do is continue pushing: It is an ongoing colonization.”